A woman involved in a heated debate with Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson over Ivanka Trump said Tuesday she’s received thousands of angry responses, including being threatened with rape on Christmas Day.

The reaction to Lauren Duca, a writer for Teen Vogue magazine, is the latest example of how ugliness in political discourse didn’t end with the election. Duca has been sharing several of the responses to her television appearance on social media.

She was a guest on Carlson’s show Friday to discuss an incident where Donald Trump’s daughter was verbally accosted while traveling on an airplane with her family. Duca had tweeted that Ivanka Trump’s role in the incoming administration was fair game for discussion.

The segment was knocked off-kilter, however, when Duca agreed with Carlson that it was wrong for Ivanka Trump to be confronted on an airplane. Carlson had been prepared to question Duca about her tweet and other things she had written that had been critical of Donald Trump.

[...]

Then the online attacks began, many too lewd to repeat. She saw an online discussion board created to encourage people “to harass me until I have a mental breakdown or go into porn.”

She said she responded to one person, asking whether it felt odd to attack a stranger on Christmas Day.

“He wrote back saying ‘get raped,’ so that didn’t work,” she said.

[...]

As a woman online, she said she’s experienced sexist attacks before, but never on this level. “It feels Victorian,” she said. “It’s very bizarre to experience this firsthand.”

The Arkansas senator argues correctly that low-skill immigration lowers wages. He leaves out that welfare reform must force Americans to move to places they don’t want to live and do jobs they don’t especially want to do. A good start though.

Yes, a lot of famous people died this year—a Tweet yesterday reminded 2016 that Roman Polanski has been overlooked so far—but Kevin Williamson points out that an Ethiopian famine this year killed ... no one and adds this:

In the past 30 years, the worldwide rate of extreme poverty has been halved. In the past ten years, new diagnoses of HIV in the United States were reduced by 20 percent, and the number of Americans who die from AIDS is today about 14 percent of what it was at its high point in the 1990s. The U.S. Army and the Canadian public-health agency, working with Merck, have finished trials on a new Ebola vaccine; it is 100 percent effective.

And he looks ahead:

What does the new year hold for the United States? Bad things will happen, of course, as they always do. But I like our record: While we make up only about 5 percent of the world’s population, we Americans have a hand in practically every other cool, interesting, inventive, creative, and life-improving innovation you see. Everybody knows. They know it in India and in China and in Switzerland and in South Africa, in no small part because their best and brightest work and study here.

So, bitch and moan all you like. You’re walking around with more computing power in your pocket than they used to land men on the Moon, and more personal, creative, and economic opportunities than 99.03 percent of the people who have ever lived could even dream of. Your 2017 is going to be what you make of it.

Tuesday, 27 December 2016

On a recent December morning, Lorena Bobbitt, now 47, was organizing Christmas presents inside her home in a gated community in suburban Virginia, as her dog Ringo, a 12-year-old bichon with thinning white hair, scampered under foot. She lives with her longtime partner, Dave Bellinger, and their only child.

Putting this all together, we simply don’t know if the Daily Mail story is completely false, completely true or somewhere in the middle. Snopes itself has not issued a formal response to the article and its founder David Mikkelson responded by email that he was unable to address many of the claims due to a confidentiality clause in his divorce settlement. This creates a deeply unsettling environment in which when one tries to fact check the fact checker, the answer is the equivalent of “its secret.” Moreover, David’s responses regarding the hiring of strongly partisan fact checkers and his lack of response on screening and assessment protocols present a deeply troubling picture of a secretive black box that acts as ultimate arbitrator of truth, yet reveals little of its inner workings. This is precisely the same approach used by Facebook for its former Trending Topics team and more recently its hate speech rules (the company did not respond to a request for comment).

[...]

Regardless of whether the Daily Mail article is correct in its claims about Snopes, at the least what does emerge from my exchanges with Snopes’ founder is the image of the ultimate black box presenting a gleaming veneer of ultimate arbitration of truth, yet with absolutely no insight into its inner workings. While technology pundits decry the black boxes of the algorithms that increasingly power companies like Facebook, they have forgotten that even the human-powered sites offer us little visibility into how they function.

At the end of the day, it is clear that before we rush to place fact checking organizations like Snopes in charge of arbitrating what is “truth” on Facebook, we need to have a lot more understanding of how they function internally and much greater transparency into their work.

And the icing on the cake was a New York Timespiece which ignored the Daily Mail’s facts entirely:

One way to chart Snopes’s increasing prominence is by measuring the rise in fake news about the site itself. If you believe the internet, the founder of Snopes, David Mikkelson, has a longer rap sheet than Al Capone. He was supposedly arrested for committing fraud and corruption and running a pit bull ring. In the wake of a deal that Snopes and others made this month to start fact-checking for Facebook, new slurs and allegations poured forth.

The underlying message of these spurious attacks is that the movement to fact-check the internet is a left-wing conspiracy whose real goal is to censor the right, and therefore must be resisted at all costs.

Since the Republican Party’s unexpected triumph November 9, pundits and columnists have debated nonstop the meaning of a Trump presidency for Barack Obama’s legacy.

Will Republicans scrap the Affordable Care Act? Will they roll back groundbreaking environmental protections? Will they reorient American foreign policy away from traditional allies? Will they pack the Supreme Court with ultra-conservative jurists?

To be sure, Obama’s legacy is very much on the line. Yet remarkably, so is that of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Johnson left office in 1969, the victim of self-inflicted political wounds over Vietnam. But in the half-century since his presidency, much of his Great Society remains intact. Health care for the elderly and poor. Categorical aid to primary and secondary education. Civil rights and voting rights. Nutritional assistance for hungry children. These programs not only survived successive Republican administrations. They thrived, and in some cases, grew under presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

Until now.

With majorities in both houses, congressional Republicans under the leadership of House Speaker Paul Ryan have signaled their plans to disassemble not just the Affordable Care Act, but also Medicaid and Medicare; to steer federal education policy away from public schools and toward charters and vouchers; to roll back voting rights and civil rights enforcement; and to make steep cuts to nutritional programs. And, despite the fact that many of these changes could have negative consequences for Trump’s base, the president-elect hasn’t signaled any resistance.

The writer then proceeds to imagine a world without the Great Society, but instead imagines a world with 1950’s technology and racism.